Doctors have issued a warning about flu season in the UK after a “large number” of youngsters needed hospital care after catching the virus in Australia. Parents are being urged to take up the offer of a flu nasal spray for their children as data suggests flu season has arrived early this year.
Dr Dame Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said that it was difficult to predict the severity of flu and Covid-19 spikes this winter in the UK, but she referred to the flu season in Australia where there were high case rates and hospital admissions for flu among young people.
Asked if the NHS should expect a difficult winter, Dame Jenny told a Royal Society of Medicine webinar on Covid-19: “The difficult thing is that we can’t expect anything, we should be anxious about it and I think that’s exactly what we should be. The word ‘twindemic’ is not a guaranteed position for this winter but it’s one that we should be reasonably planning for."
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She told the seminar: “In Australia what they saw was an H3N2 (flu) wave, it came earlier in the season than it would normally… a couple of months earlier. It left large numbers of children in hospital and there were very high rates in children."
She warned that children could be hit harder in the UK this year too, explaining that the impact of the pandemic meant that "many of those younger children have not previously been exposed during periods where there would be normal socialising".
She added: “We can’t predict the exact timing – it could be quite possible to have both (flu and Covid) rising at the same time; it could be that we have one peak followed by another, which would put substantial pressure on health services; and we might see slightly unusual patterns – for example in younger children, when we tend to think of flu predominantly affecting older individuals.”
Dame Jenny continued: “The two areas I would promote… partly because of that narrative of what’s happened in Australia over their winter period, is to ensure that younger children at infant school and preschool, and some of the younger ages in secondary school, are coming forward for nasal flu vaccinations as we approached winter. But really importantly – the group that somehow we never quite manage to support into getting the vaccination – are the middle age group with underlying conditions.”
Cases of flu have risen across England, with more calls to NHS 111 and a slight rise in people seeking help from their GP for flu-like symptoms, according to data released by the UKHSA last week.
Overall, flu levels are still at a relatively low level. However, the latest data suggests hospital and intensive admissions for flu are rising quickest in children under five.
Around 33 million people in England are eligible for a free flu vaccine this year, including people aged 50 and over, pregnant women, frontline health workers and people with weakened immune systems. Also included are all primary-age and some secondary-age children, who will be offered a nasal spray rather than a flu jab.
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